A Season in Purgatory
A Season in Purgatory is a 1993 novel by
The hardcover edition (
Plot synopsis
The novel's protagonist and narrator is Harrison Burns, whose boarding school education was partially funded by Gerald Bradley, the patriarch of a large, wealthy, politically well-connected
Critical reception
In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd observed, "In his latest cafe-society roman a clef . . . Dominick Dunne takes all the most chilling character flaws of three generations of Kennedys and compresses them into one creepy plot line. If you can bear to read one more word, even with a gossamer veneer of fiction, about America's royal and sorrowful Irish Catholic clan, and if you like Mr. Dunne's dishy style of society vivisection, then you will probably enjoy his new tour of the toxic side of a golden American family."[2]
Gene Lyons of Entertainment Weekly thought, "What ought to have been the gripping courtroom drama hinted at in the novel's opening pages becomes a murky progression of botched assassinations, fortuitous heart attacks and strokes, and a homicide trial filled with more legal absurdities than a half-dozen episodes of Night Court. After so promising a start, it's a letdown." Despite his disappointment, he graded it "a solid B."[3]
A critical analysis of themes in Dunne's fiction, "The Inconvenient Women: Feminine Consciousness and the American Gentry in the Popular Novels of Dominick Dunne" [4] by Robert von Dassanowsky, posits that Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited strongly influenced the structure and characters of A Season in Purgatory.
Television adaptation
Robert W. Lenski adapted the novel for a May 1996 CBS miniseries directed by David Greene. The cast included Patrick Dempsey as Harrison Burns, Craig Sheffer as Constant Bradley, and Brian Dennehy as Gerald Bradley, with Sherilyn Fenn, Edward Herrmann, David Marshall Grant, Bonnie Bedelia, and Blair Brown in supporting roles.
References
- ^ December 17, 2002 Dominick Dunne profile by Jeff Falcon at Surftofind.com
- ^ Dowd, Maureen. "The Crimes of Constant Bradley". archive.nytimes.com. Archived from the original on April 20, 2022. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
- ^ "A Season in Purgatory". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on April 21, 2009. Retrieved October 1, 2008.
- ^ Popular Culture Review VII/1 (1997)
External links
- A Season in Purgatory at IMDb